Perfect Timing by Jill Mansell

began unpacking a box of assorted silver photograph frames.
    â€˜Look at that.’ Balancing her tea on the flat, glass-fronted jewelry cabinet, Poppy picked out one of the larger frames with its photograph still in place. The sepia-tinted print, dated 1925, was of a stiffly posed family. Mother, father, and assorted children stared unsmilingly up at her. ‘They all look like their father. Minus the moustache.’
    â€˜You could polish up these frames if you like,’ offered Jake. He pointed to the hallmark on another frame. ‘Date?’
    â€˜George the something.’ Poppy wasn’t in the mood for hallmarks. She looked again at the sepia print. A small knot began to tighten in the pit of her stomach.
    â€˜Fifth,’ said Jake. ‘George V.’ He frowned. ‘You seem a bit… are you all right?’
    â€˜Hmmm?’
    â€˜You don’t look quite with it.’
    Poppy broke into a grin. In his dark green cardigan full of holes, his blue and white striped shirt, and brown houndstooth check trousers, if anyone was looking not quite with it, it was Jake.
    â€˜Sorry, I was thinking.’
    Jake, who had heard about little else for the past week, said, ‘About the move I suppose.’
    â€˜Actually no. I was wondering if I look anything like my father.’
    â€˜Ah.’ He had heard about this too, over the course of the last three months. ‘Well, I can’t help you there.’
    â€˜I want to find him,’ said Poppy, the words coming out in a rush. Quite suddenly it mattered more than anything else in the world. She felt like an alcoholic begging for a drink. ‘I know I probably won’t be able to but I have to at least give it a try. I have to—’
    â€˜Are you sure?’
    Poppy had been um-ing and ah-ing about this for weeks. Jake’s only experience in the matter was of an adopted schoolfriend who had managed to trace his natural mother then been traumatized by her refusal to meet him. Some things, Jake felt, were best left unmeddled with.
    But Poppy had made up her mind. ‘I must. It might be impossible. But it might not. He could be living just round the corner from me. Imagine if he was and I didn’t know …’
    â€˜How are you going to do it?’
    She nodded in the direction of the phone books stacked up beneath his cluttered desk.
    â€˜There are seventeen A. Fitzpatricks listed in the London area. I’ll start by phoning them.’
    â€˜Try and be a bit discreet,’ said Jake. He wouldn’t put anything past Poppy. She was liable to turn up on their doorsteps armed with a do-it-yourself DNA testing kit.
    The few details Poppy had been able to glean about her father had come from Dina, who had in turn learned them from her mother-in-law Margaret McBride. According to this thirdhand information, her mother had met Alex Fitzpatrick at a country club on the outskirts of Bristol. She was working there behind the bar and he had played the trumpet in the resident jazz band.
    Alex had moved down from London to take the job, because even if the pay was peanuts, it was better than nothing at all. He might have been poor but jazz was his great love; it was what he lived for.
    Laura Dunbar, so legend had it, was finding married life less enthralling than she had been led to expect. Meeting Alex Fitzpatrick, who kept nightclub hours, drank Jack Daniels on the rocks, and laughed at the deeply suburban lifestyles of the members of Ash Hill Country Club, had knocked her for six.
    Alex had a gravelly Cockney drawl, a quick wit, and a career in what could just about be called show business. He also made Laura laugh, which mattered more than anything. She fell in love with Alex Fitzpatrick, ignored the fact that he had a wife waiting for him back in London, and threw herself headlong into a recklessly indiscreet affair. It became the talk of the country club. It wasn’t long before everyone knew, including Mervyn